Aluminum spacers. They are cheap and light enough to carry anywhere. Here you can see some paracord, two spacers in their packages, a Wave, a lighter, and you can just make out my cat Bones's feet on my laptop. Bones was very eager to "help."

Here are the spacers in their packages if you want the details:

Here's what they look like from the end:

Cut your paracord at an angle so it's easier to thread into the spacer:

The idea is to use the lighter to melt the paracord, then pull the cord halfway into the spacer and roll the spacer back and forth around the paracord with your fingers until it has mostly cooled down. I like to heat the paracord until it's on fire, then blow it out and quickly pull it inside the spacer and start rolling. I didn't have enough hands to take pictures of that process, but here's the paracord inside the spacer so you get the idea:

Here's the finished paracord end after I shaped it inside the tube:

These spacers are so small and light that I plan to get a bunch more and scatter them throughout my gear. One of the ones I have now is attached to my spool of paracord. The other is on this lanyard attached to my Gerber Shard:

You can find these spacers at hardware stores in the fasteners section. The ones I have were around $0.80 each. I'm looking forward to saving myself a bunch of burned fingers and blobby paracord ends.

Holding a grudge is like swallowing poison and expecting someone else to die.

SMoAF wrote:You could have your very own Trunk SMoAF. That'd HAVE to have some practical value for you.

We ended up needing to produce a fair number of finished ends for some scout projects and ended up buying an electric soldering gun with a cutter tip. It both cuts and seals the paracord at the same time. However, I think I need to get a couple of these and add your trick to my repertoire for when that is not preactical.

looks like a nice solution for when you want a nice smooth end to thread thru something. There are times however (as when making braided lanyards and such when I want just the opposite, I want a larger flared end to lock the end into my braid and keep it from pulling through my final loop. For this I heat the paracord end and them press the end with the side of a kitchen knife to give me a flat end with a flange that is larger than the paracord diameter.